13 October 2011 11:42 AM

The CQC is a symptom of the disease it was set up to cure

The Care Quality Commission says that half of all NHS hospitals are not caring for their patients properly.

Of course, they don’t put this disgrace in ordinary English like that. Instead there is a lot of talk about "delivery of care” and (a sentence I can make no sense of) “The training and development of staff particularly in nursing need to look long and hard at why the focus has become the unity of work rather than the person.”

In truth, the Care Quality Commission is a symptom of the disease it was set up to cure.

This disease is bureaucracy. When an organization such as the NHS – or you could say the same about state education – attains to such vast numbers of highly unionized employees, it ceases to exist for the sake of the people it was set up to serve, and exists instead for the benefit of those who operate the organization.

Most of these people are bureaucrats, people gazing into computer screens and devising spreadsheets. Forty years ago there were five hundred senior managers in the NHS. Today there are seventy thousand.

What we are seeing here is the sovietisation of what we used to call charity.

As a parish priest in the City, I visit my parishioners in all the London hospitals. Some of these places are admirable. They are clean, efficient and cheerful.

It’s a pleasure to enter them. People are admitted with something wrong with them, and they come out repaired and restored. Others are frankly filthy. In these, the staff give the impression not only that they don’t care, but that they haven’t a clue how to care. I have seen scores of my people degenerate sickeningly in these hospitals.

I have seen many come out with more and worse diseases that those for which they were admitted in the first place. An old lady parishioner of mine developed bed-sores. It was explained to me that the staff were not allowed to lift and turn patients – and so prevent this easily avoidable hazard – “for reasons of health and safety.”

Does it get more Orwellian, more satanic, than that: that considerations of health and safety produce disease and decay?

When I was a boy in the 1950s I spent a lot of time in two great hospitals: The Leeds General Infirmary and St James. These places were run like a military campaign. They were spotless. Any nurse allowing her patient to develop bedsores would have been severely reprimanded, if not dismissed. There was a strong sense of doctoring and nursing as a vocation, a calling. The staff were expected – and they lived up to the expectation – to be dedicated and to give of themselves sacrificially

Certain recollections from all those years ago linger in my mind. I remember getting up at five-thirty and taking wash- bowls and bedpans round to the old men who were bed-bound. I recall being taught by the nurses how to turn perfect bed-sheets with “hospital corners.”

I remember seeing nurses read novels and poetry to the patients. Most vividly of all, I remember the night staff going off duty at 7.55am and the day staff coming in and standing around the ward sister’s desk for prayers

Can you imagine with what scorn the unionized, stalinised bureaucrats in today’s NHS would regard such devotion and piety?